by Aisha Saeed
“Another trap,” Augustus said, grim.
“He’s creative,” Sakina grumbled. “Should’ve used his talents to take up painting or something useful.”
Diana looked at the metal teeth. Her stomach hurt. Sakina broke her leg falling from the chariot. Augustus was almost devoured by spiders. Danger lurked everywhere they turned. The demon remained a mystery to her, but the only known constant was that he had done everything in his power to get to her.
“Don’t be so worried. He’s definitely dangerous, but we’ve got this.” Sakina put an arm around Diana’s shoulder. “We’ll outsmart him. Just have to figure out what makes him tick.”
“Not ‘we.’ Me,” Diana said.
“Excuse me?” Sakina asked.
“Augustus, if you can talk me through the rest of the path and where I need to go, I can take it from here.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Sakina asked. “This is literally the worst possible timing for a joke.”
“It’s me he wants. Why should you both put yourselves in harm’s way?”
“I can understand your line of thinking.” Augustus adjusted his glasses. “But I know this island better than both of you. The demon will be up on the third plane, at the very top. It’s flat and smooth up there—but it is definitely not simple getting there. You have to know your way around or you’ll wind up walking in circles. And”—he cleared his throat—“I’m the reason you’re here. I have to help you.”
“And I’m not a snow leopard you can just order to hang back,” Sakina retorted.
“No. You’re my best friend.” Diana’s voice cracked. “You could have died when the chariot broke apart.”
“Okay. How about this? I’ll hang back and let you go on your own.” Sakina folded her arms. “But only if you can answer this question: If I was being targeted by a vapor demon, would you sit back, wish me luck, and watch me go on my way?”
“Come on,” Diana protested. “That’s different.”
“It’s exactly the same,” she replied with pursed lips. “And you know it.”
Diana smiled a little. This much was true. She’d never allow anyone—let alone her best friend—to face known danger without being there to help.
“Fine,” Diana said. “Let’s destroy the demon together. But before we do, we have to figure out how we’re getting to the next plane of the island without getting caught in one of these traps.”
“Mira can help us out,” said Sakina.
The bird fluttered over to them.
“Can you fly overhead and see where the traps are?” Sakina asked the creature. “Maybe with your bird’s-eye view you can find us a path to safely follow.”
Mira chirped and flew into the night. Beams of light shot like sparks on the ground all around them. Returning after a few minutes, she swept down to pull on Sakina’s sleeve with her beak and chirped.
“Mira says the safest way forward is on the left. There’s still some danger, but she said it’s the best bet,” Sakina said. “She’ll light the way.”
The three of them scrambled up the hillside, following a worn path with the bird leading the way. Ancient trees and twisting branches grew on either side. Diana’s calves already ached from the vertical ascent. Augustus wasn’t joking when he said this part of Sáz was steep.
“Whoa!” Augustus burst out.
“What’s the matter?” Diana asked.
“I tripped over something.” He bent down to examine the dirt. “Is that…a wire?”
A sharp whistling noise sounded through the trees.
“Step back!” Diana yanked Augustus away as an arrow flew past them, slamming into a tree to their left.
The three of them stared at the metal arrow. It was wedged halfway into the trunk.
“That was…c-close.” Sakina’s voice shook.
“Looks like it was fashioned out of our specialty carving tools,” Augustus said. His voice trembled. “The ones w-we use to add d-details, like leaves and flowers, to the chariots. They’ve been weaponized.”
“He wants to kill me,” Diana said slowly.
“No.” Augustus shook his head. “He was clear he needed you alive. These arrows are positioned low; they’d incapacitate you, but they wouldn’t kill you.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” Sakina muttered.
Kneeling, Diana saw thin wires pressed against the ground, tightly wound and stretching toward distant trees, where metal makeshift arrows poised against a line of trunks, ready to deploy in their direction at the slightest touch. The wires were only inches from one another.
“They stretch to the white boulder up ahead.” Diana squinted. “It’s a good twenty feet away….”
“We can divert through the trees on either side of the path to avoid them,” said Sakina.
“But what if there’s worse waiting for us in the forest? Mira led us this way for a reason. We can do this. But we have to take our time and focus,” Diana said. She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt.
Gingerly, the three of them stood on their tiptoes. One by one, with Diana in the lead, they stepped over the next wire—careful to not so much as graze it. She tried her best to push out the image of the arrows pressed against the tree trunks, waiting for the smallest misstep to deploy.
“Three more to go…,” Sakina murmured as they continued to tread.
“Two now,” Augustus said hopefully, after they successfully avoided another trip wire.
“And one!” Diana said, jumping onto the white boulder beyond the treacherous section of traps.
Diana exhaled with relief as Augustus and Sakina clambered onto the rock.
“Before we continue, we just have to do one thing.” Diana leaned down and gathered pebbles from the ground. With a flick of her wrist, she skipped them along the wires.
Within seconds metal arrows sliced through the air across from where they stood.
“What are you doing?” Augustus asked.
“She’s making sure they don’t deploy on anyone else,” Sakina said.
“Exactly.” Diana nodded. “Can’t undo all these traps, but we have to at least try disarming the most dangerous ones. No one should have to risk getting sliced with an arrow.”
They continued uphill with Mira guiding the way. The farther they walked, the more strenuous the uphill hike grew. Part of Diana felt tempted to scamper up the hill as fast as she could, to put the grueling hike behind her, but it wasn’t worth the risk. There was no telling what danger awaited them—one small misstep could spell the end.
They skirted around deep pits that popped up on either side of them, yawning wide into the darkness. They hopped over steel blades sticking straight out of the earth, awaiting an unsuspecting foot.
“Stay low,” Diana warned. They approached a tree whose low-hanging branches stretched above their path. “Not sure anything’s up there, but you never know.”
Inching closer, she peered through the leaves. A brown rope dangled amidst the branches. Looking at the ground, Diana pointed at the trip wire snaking through the dirt.
“He’s determined,” Sakina grimly said as they stepped over it. “Gotta give him that much.”
“How much longer until we’re on the second plane?” Diana asked, glancing at the darkness ahead of them. It would have been hard enough for one person to evade all the traps they’d encountered, but three people? Her stomach hurt from worry about what more might lie ahead.
“Shouldn’t be long,” Augustus said. “We’re going so slow, it’s taking longer than it normally would.”
Augustus’s breathing grew heavy the farther they journeyed. She saw him clutch his arm, wincing from pain. His elbow hadn’t fully healed yet. Diana’s own calves ached. Sakina’s forehead trickled with perspiration. But they didn’t stop moving. They kept climbing until at
last the steep uphill ascent gave way to a flat, flower-filled meadow. A rush of relief passed through Diana.
“We made it,” Sakina said. She collapsed onto the grass and wiped her brow.
Diana looked around. Even under the darkness of night, the second plane was undeniably beautiful. Trees flanked with colorful leaves—red, pink, and yellow—and flowering bushes lined the edges of a towering granite cliff. Wildflowers filled the grassy meadow. A sulfuric smell from the river of lava they’d seen overhead wafted to them now. Diana pinched her nose. But even the odor wasn’t enough to erase the beauty.
“This is incredible,” Diana said. “Almost hard to believe it’s real.”
“I wish you could see it all in the daylight,” Augustus said. “When Mr. Broderick is too busy with customers, I come down here and check out new herbs and plants for myself. It’s my personal potion-making playground. I was here when the demon arrived.”
“Are we close to the top now?” Diana asked. “Where the demon is?”
“If he’s still where he was when I left, we’re about halfway there.”
Only halfway? Diana sighed.
“There are cliffs all around us here, but I’ll lead us to the path that will take us straight up.”
“Can you tell us anything more about him?” Sakina asked. They walked toward the uphill path with their sides pressed against the smooth cliff wall, shrouded by trees. “The hypnotism sounds familiar. Anything, even small details, might jog my memory.”
“He arrived early in the morning, in a rowboat. At least, I assume so. There’s an unfamiliar wooden one anchored on the dock’s edge. It’s not one of ours.”
“No one questioned why a random person showed up to your island?” Sakina asked.
“I don’t think anyone would have thought he was up to anything nefarious,” Augustus replied. “The gods protect us. We don’t even have an army. Who needs one when Zeus has your back? By the time my people saw he wasn’t walking but floating, it was probably too late; he’d hypnotized them with his voice.”
“This demon’s got a death wish if he’s trying to mess with a place the gods protect,” Sakina said.
“That’s what I can’t stop thinking about.” Augustus shook his head. “I tried to come up with different hypotheses for what is going on, but none of them make sense. And if he can get around the gods, how can we stop him?”
“I guess the first thing is to make sure we don’t get enchanted,” Diana said.
“Right.” He stopped. “I almost forgot.”
Augustus kneeled down and plucked two fuzzy flowers from the ground. They were all different colors and scattered throughout the meadow.
“I used these petals.” He handed them to the girls. “You’ll still be able to hear, but it muffles the noise a bit.”
Both girls crumpled the petals and stuffed them into their ears.
“Wow! It tickles.” Sakina giggled.
It was true. Diana laughed a little. The flower felt soft and fuzzy in her ears, but if it did the job of protecting them from being hypnotized, it was perfect. Suddenly she straightened.
“Did you feel that?” she asked.
“No.” Sakina shook her head. “I didn’t—”
Diana pressed a finger to her lips. The vibration grew louder.
“Footsteps,” Sakina whispered.
“It’s my people.” Augustus paled. “The demon probably sent them. They’re coming. For us.”
The vibrations beneath them grew louder. They were close. The three of them would be found out any second. They needed to do something—now.
“We have to hide,” Diana said breathlessly. “What’s the safest place? Any caves in these cliffs? A structure of any kind to slip into?”
Augustus scanned the forest. Then he nodded.
“Follow me,” he whispered.
The trio hurried in the opposite direction, taking care to stay shrouded behind the trees lining the granite cliff to their left. The footsteps grew louder.
Diana thought about her sword tucked into her belt. She’d never used it to fight anyone in actual combat. Now Diana wondered: If it came down to it, could she do it? Could she fight to save herself and her friends?
“There!” Augustus said. He raced to a thick sequoia tree and peered inside. Within seconds, he disappeared.
Sakina and Diana followed suit. The hollowed-out tree was cool and dark inside. They peered out through a narrow opening, small as a keyhole. Seconds later, men appeared and raced past the tree.
Diana felt weak with relief. They’d almost been caught. But they’d hid just in time.
Diana counted them: twenty men in total. They held thick clubs. Some had white-blond hair, others a sandy brown. They looked like older versions of Augustus. But their expressions were blank. Their buttoned shirts fluttered against the breeze with each step. Were it not for the dead look in their eyes, they would seem like regular people on their way to an important errand. Wordlessly they stalked past the kids and off into the distance.
After a minute or so, Sakina whispered, “Is it clear?”
“Augustus said there’s only one path up, so they’ll be back,” said Diana. “He’s probably got them on patrol duty to look for us. Let’s make sure they’re safely gone before we step out and try to use the path.”
Sure enough, a few moments later footsteps sounded again. The men rounded a corner and stomped past them, and then their footsteps faded away.
“That was close,” Sakina said.
“Too close,” Diana said. “How long do you think we have before they come back, Augustus?”
Augustus didn’t respond. When she looked at him, his face was as white as mist, his expression haunted.
“Augustus, are you all right?” she asked gently.
“I know they’re hypnotized,” he said in a shaky voice. “But it’s hard to see them like that. Ferdinand and his brothers—they run the corner bakery. Make the freshest biscuits you could imagine; soft on the inside and crispy on the outside. And Silvio—he was in the back—he’s cut my hair since I was up to his knee. They’re good people. There’s a ninety-nine point nine percent probability that not one of those people hunting for us would hurt so much as a fly. But now they have clubs. And their eyes…It’s scary to see them so blank. Like the lights are off and no one is home.”
“This must be so hard to see. But it’s not them. Not really,” Diana said. “He’s hijacked their minds.”
“You’re right,” he said. “But I don’t know why…it still hurts.”
Diana looked at his crushed expression. If any of the women of her island—Cylinda and Yen, or Aunt Antiope—were hunting for her, even if she could explain away why, she would have been devastated, too.
“We’ll fix this,” Diana reassured him. “We’ll do everything we can. But we need to act fast. Who knows when they’ll be back.”
With the petals still blocking their ears and muffling the noise around them, Diana kept her eyes peeled, glancing about with each step they took.
“I could get the Lasso of Truth around him,” said Diana as they hurried along, still wary of hidden traps. “I’d have to figure out how, but once the demon’s caught, he’ll confess. They believe everything he says, so when he tells them the truth, they’ll believe that, too, won’t they?”
“But the demon is made of vapor,” Augustus said. “Can the lasso work on him?”
“I’m not sure.” Diana’s confidence wavered.
“Could you tell us more about what the demon was like?” Sakina asked. “Any funny characteristics? What exactly did his voice sound like?”
“He spoke with a growl. Like the voice was scraping against his throat to get out. He wore a black robe,” Augustus said. “It had an orange stripe down the back.”
“Orange stripe,�
� Sakina said, frowning. “Was he tall?”
“Yes. He stood a foot taller than the tallest person on our island. And he was skinny, too. Like a pole.”
A cackle burst through the air then. It was faint, in the distance, but the sound was impossible to miss. High-pitched and intense. Though their ears were muffled, the sound pulsed through the air and ricocheted against their skin like drops of rain.
“That’s him,” Augustus whispered. His eyes looked haunted.
“That laugh…,” Sakina said slowly. “He’s a Bulnama demon. I read that they cackle at a high-pitched volume in pulsing beats. I read about him last week! The Bulnama demons stand out because they’re rare. There’s only a handful of them in the world. They have a solid orblike thing floating in the middle of them that keeps them ticking. And they’re obsessive. Bounty hunters by trade. They’ve destroyed entire nations trying to search for one small item.” She sighed. “I wish I could remember how to destroy them.”
“If the orb is solid, that’s it, then,” Augustus said, and a small smile formed on his face. “If I can come up with something to destroy the orb, it’ll probably be enough to destroy all of him.”
“You think?” Diana asked hopefully.
“I’m not positive,” he said slowly. “But if I can get the right ingredients together—ones that disrupt ions with full intensity, along with an acidic kicker to break it all down…and if we can mix it all in the proper order, we might be able to dispel him.”
“What sorts of ingredients do you think you need?” Diana asked. She’d have far preferred a surefire way to destroy the demon, but this was the first hopeful thing she’d heard since they arrived.
“Water to help mix it up would be first.” Augustus tapped his foot. “Running water is the purest, so that would be ideal. Oh! And slington berries. They grow up against the cliff walls. We use them on the island as a cooling agent for everything from fevers to stray lava burns. But the other two things we’ll need…” His expression grew clouded. “Those will be trickier.”
“How come?” Diana asked, studying his worried expression.